"... this is so God knows where to put my mustache."

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Karen recommends these on line literary sites.

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Contact
Ms. Masullo

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Karen Masullo reads "Advice from Nona"

Advice from Nona

I have a crease under my nose above my top lip;
my grandmother tells me this is so God
knows where to put my mustache.

She says one day I'll have a little bald spot,
and will understand humility --
she says this as she adjusts her wig.

She tells me to stay close to Italian women:
they cook the sauce and feed your relatives,
they write down names from cards attached
to wreathes and bouquets;
remind you to send thank you's.

The women know which candles to light;
they recite the right prayers to the Madonna,
protect your husband's ghost with each novena,
rock with practiced passion and cry for you.
At no other time will they cry for you.

My grandmother told me to keep my closet clean,
and in one section -- maybe in the back or the middle,
keep my black dress ready.






The Art of Apology

I didn't mean to search for my father in the madmen of my life;
not in the minister's son with his chaste girl back home

who took me to the Who, drank tequila for breakfast;
slept with my friend for two years. I never knew

until I found them; both relieved at my discovery,
her with heavy lids and cigarette ash skin, her scent

in my sheets -- sheets that flew and danced against narrow
building walls finally resting in the alley below my bedroom window.

I wasn't searching in the one with crystal eyes and rounded hips;
who suggested his friends and mine would make interesting lovers,

who lectured on the proper way to dry hair, snort cocaine;
laugh softer. I could be less of an embarrassment

if only I'd try. He found his mother in a man in California,
but he wasn't looking either.

I should have looked more closely at the man who became a murderer,
who told me -- a woman like you should never have to ask;

who imagined he loved women, captured them through his lens,
eventually stilled a life with the rape kit in his camera bag.

I'm sorry I searched so unconsciously, for convincing myself answers are so easy,
for pretending I wasn't looking for a madman to cure.






Carly Takes Another Ride

Carly's face is a clouded lake, an occasional hint of movement
ripples her surface with no reflection,
her arms, legs, back and neck,
thin like new trees, carry her body as heavy snow.

Jackie buys her own clothes in the young men's department,
saves her money for breasts she's seen in Glamour and Vogue;
the skin on her palms seems an ideal color, she turns her hands
outward against her cheeks, studies the contrast. Perfect.

Her knuckles are cracked and bloody from the cold she says.
She rolls one hand over the other unconsciously.

Leann calls from a room at the Budget Inn, says the client wants
someone else: he's older than her grandfather and has a small
silver vibrator. She can't fake some things.

Her jaw is yellow turning black. She's always walking
into doors and never laughs. Her man says she's too old, too fat.
Leann says Carly should take her call, but Jackie goes instead;

Leann sees her man and comes up short one last time.
They find her body under a bridge by the Third and Broad Grill:
she's got seventeen broken bones. The police rule it a suicide.

Jackie hears the news and doesn't cry; she goes to a 7-11,
buys more Brillo pads, rests naked at the edge of her bed.
She stares in a mirror, cups one breast, begins to scrub the dark away.

Carly sits where they left her, watches black tar smoke
on molded aluminum foil. Her veins call: come here, come in.
She thinks she'll make a boat from the foil,
float away in idle rivers under her skin.






Carmela's Cross

Carmela lives in Portchester,
takes the train into the city, cuts hair for Bonnie.

Five days a week for twenty-two years she's taken this train,
walked four blocks to perm, tease, and corn-row;
she mostly does braids now.

She gossips in Spanish, shifts her weight
to save her feet, bends her knees, side-to-side,
a quiet mambo dancer in worn pink slippers.

She fixes wigs for women whose breasts are gone,
their hair lost with them.

At the end of each day, Carmela gives Bonnie thirty percent,
reverses her morning path, sits in the same train car,
watches the Bronx roll by like an abstract film in brown and gray.

She looks for new graffiti and occasionally touches a scar on her neck,
slides her finger along its edge from the mole below her left earlobe
to the one above her right shoulder.
She thanks God she goes home to an empty house now.

At night, she makes tea, cries, jumps at loud sounds,
and prays to an old wooden crucifix that guards her bed.